Thursday, January 19, 2012

Summify is Acquired By Twitter

On Thursday, January 19 Twitter confirmed that it has acquired a company called Summify. Summify is a service that sorts through your social media profile to find some of the most relevant updates and statuses and sends them to either your inbox or an iPhone app.

Summify looks at all of the items that your friends have shared on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, monitors how often the items have been shared and then looks at how often they have been shared by all users of the network. This is how the service decides what is most relevant and interesting to you.

"We're excited that Summify has joined Twitter," a Twitter spokesperson said. "Cristian Strat and Mircea Pasoi have created a product that curates the best and most important stories in your Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed. Cristian, Mircea and their team of three engineers will join our Growth team and explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news."

Summify also expressed their opinions about the deal in a blog post that was released on January 19.

"Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner," Summify wrote. "As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it's the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense."

Summify went on to discuss that the service will be shutting down in the next few weeks, and it is no longer allowing new registrations. The company also said that it has already disabled some of the features that Summify users used to enjoy. The blog post stated, “We will keep the email summaries for a few more weeks, but at some point we will shut down the current Summify product. In the meantime, if you’re a user of Summify, you’ll still receive your summaries just like before.”

Summify was comprised of a five-person team that was located in Vancouver; however, the team will soon be relocating to San Francisco where they will be joining the Twitter Growth team. There they will “continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.”